Barite

specimen number:
2063565

location:
Book Cliffs, Mesa Co., Colorado, USA

description:
A parallel grouping of glassy gemmy colorless terminated barite crystals with little attached matrix. Complete all around, in good condition. The specimen comes with a previous label from the collection of Ray DeMark.

The Book Cliffs in Mesa County, Colorado, form a prominent series of sandstone cliffs and mudstone slopes carved largely from the Late Cretaceous Mancos Shale and Mesaverde Group sedimentary rocks. Deposited in and along the ancient Western Interior Seaway, the soft, fine-grained shale beds host abundant calcite and barite mineral veins and nodules that precipitated from low-temperature hydrothermal fluids or late-stage groundwater passing through fractured strata. Field collecting has a rich history along the exposed bluffs, where amateur collectors and mineralogists have searched for decades along washouts and cliff faces near Grand Junction. The locality is renowned for producing exceptionally clear, golden-yellow to pale brown tabular barite crystals, often perched elegantly inside dark gray septarian concretions or within calcite-lined pockets, making specimens from the Book Cliffs highly sought after in regional rockhounding circles.

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